Monday, 13 August 2012

Series: Morning GloriesWords: Nick SpenserImages: Joe Eisma, EsquejoIssue Number: 1 and 2 Release Date: 2011Format: Trade
Around the time of starting my hiatus I received a lovely Birthday gift of some graphic novels that I had seen and passed over while hunting around my local comic store. For me Morning Glories was a prime example of don’t judge a book by its cover. I was gifted it for my birthday and my first impression was it would be My So Called Life meets Prep school. I could not have been more wrong.
The author Nick Spenser describes the comic as “Runaways” meets “Lost" I will give him “Runaways”. The comic follows six scrappy ragtag kids slotted into character archetypes (and done well) who are up against evil adult authority figures that they should be able to trust but are abusing their power (in more ways then one) and are seemingly up to no good at every turn.
I tragically have never seen “Lost”. The closest I have come to watching “Lost” was when I watched the “How Lost Should Have Ended” with friends. So I have no idea if the comic is anything at all like “Lost”.
For me it certainly did have a Whedon feel right up to making me care about characters and then making them suffer horribly or die. But instead of “Lost” for me it has elements that reminds me of Locke & Key or if I can branch into fiction books elements that remind me Charles De Lint’s horror writings (first published under the pseudonym Samuel M. Key). I am left engaged, caring about the characters, slightly on edge and in desperate need to know what happens next.
The first volume begins with each of the six students at home with their families (usually) just before they leave for their new school Morning Glory Academy. These early snippits give huge insight into the characters once and their roles once they arrive at school. On first reading I was slightly impatient but by the time I reached the end of the first volume I was very appreciative to have the context I needed to understand what was motivating how each person reacted and behaved.
So with that in mind let us get to some of the bad. The comic is pretty violent and gory at times. If that is not your thing then it is probably best you give this one a skip. It has not reached the point where I would say it is gore and violence for the sake of it but in moments it skirts painfully close to that line. Of course that does keep a very high level of tension and suspense.
There are also moments where the writers veer away from showing it all and let the readers build more horrific things in their own minds. As I have a delightfully over active imagination I’m hopeful to see more of this than the gore as the story continues on.
I’m curious and excited to see how gender will play out in the story as it develops. But before I can comment on that I am going to need a few more issues of the trades.
As it stands right now I am opting to read it in the trades as they come out. There just isn’t enough meat to each single issue to warrant adding it to the pull list. But once the entire arc comes together it has been well worth reading.

I have been very neglectful of comics, refrigerators and deconstruction and for that I apologize.

For those of you who have been wondering where I disappeared to since last November I was abducted by my own birthday and thought I would take a week or so off since I had some vacation time coming up (I take most of December off of work).
The plan was to use some of that time while I was away visiting family to build up a back log of reviews so that if life happens I could have a pile of prewritten reviews to fall back onto to continue feeding the blog. Tragically that was when life decided to happen. My December was filled with helping out with a small child while a family member of mine went overseas to spend time with a very dear aunt of mine who had just be diagnosed with a large and aggressive brain tumour.
Once that had slowed down I was in a situation where I was waiting to find out if I was or wasn’t going to be laid off from work due to funding limitations. And trying to balance my budget with severely reduced hours at work.
During that time I started to have some new health problems myself. The symptoms were so severe that at times I was on notice for going into the hospital for emergency testing. Luckily it turns out I just have severe IBS rather than any of the alternatives (I never thought I would find myself saying luckily I have IBS). The lead up to finding out the diagnosis though left me with little time for reading comics much less blogging. The stress of it all flared up a lot of my other chronic health conditions and left me with some pretty severe fatigue and in some pretty severe and chronic pain.
Luckily that has all calmed down and I am finally back on vacation only this time with the ability to read comics again!
The plan is to review the single issues in lumps of story arcs and also catch you up on the trades that I have stumbled on. I am quite hopeful there wont ever be another backlog quite like this one.

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PoipleOne has completed her Bachelors degree in "Making things right." She plans on continuing her studies, eventually earning a Masters degree in "The Older Generations Really Fucked things Up, and Now We've Got to Fix Them." Rumour has it she's banned from three Canadian universities for the crime of "refusing to listen to crappy pop music."